Entering the 11:00 a.m.
service at Seattle’s Quest Church,
the first thing a visitor notices is the homey atmosphere. The lighting is
warm, comfortable chairs sit in the front of the room, and a framed painting
adorns a side wall lit by a living-room-style floor lamp. It’s a scene that
could have been pulled right out of a house in the 1950s Pleasantville suburbs
(albeit in living color).

A second glance yanks the visitor back to the twenty-first
century. The screen above the altar encourages those gathered to “Check in on
Facebook, Gowalla, Google+, or FourSquare.” Every slide in the pre-service
rotation includes a digital aspect: “Register for the church retreat on our
Facebook page.” “Visit the church website for a list of service opportunities.”

Quest isn’t a megachurch,
and to a person, folks here emphasize that they don’t use social media just
because it’s trendy to do so or to garner bona fides from the hipsters. Maybe
the juxtaposition of the two—the old and the new, the down-home and the cutting
edge techno—is a metaphor: people are very much at home with new media. Or
perhaps it’s more fitting to note that the use of digital media grows naturally,
“organically” is a common way that Questers described it, from the day-to-day
habits and rhythms of the body of believers and those called to leadership
here.

Founding Pastor Eugene Cho explains that
he doesn’t need to intentionally seek out trends in new technology. “It’s just
part of the culture that I’m part of,” Cho says. “It is all around me. I don’t
necessarily need to do extensive research outside of my normal routine, because
even if I’m not looking for it, someone in our church or congregation is
utilizing it already. There’s no official meeting with my staff where we say,
‘Hey, should we utilize it?’ It just becomes organically a part of what we’re
doing because we see how it’s being used by people in our congregation. It’s
another way for us to connect with them.”

Joseph Lee, a twenty-something member of the Quest
congregation, uses similar language to describe the church’s use of social
media. “As trite as it sounds, a lot of the use of social media at Quest has
been organic,” Lee says. “One of the reasons why I like Quest is that it’s not
overtly in your face about social media. It’s complementary.” If the church was
overly focused on social media in artificial ways, Lee adds, he would be “kind
of turned off.” But at Quest, he says, social media is “just a new avenue to
engage people in our culture. That makes sense.”

For the Quest community, the point isn’t to be on the
cutting edge of anything. Despite Cho’s reputation as a leader in new media
communication among younger people of faith (his blog is widely read and
respected far beyond the Quest community and the Seattle area) he insists, “I
am never the first one [in the church] to adopt any new trend in media or
technology.” Rather, church leadership simply seeks to speak to its
congregation and beyond using means of communication that people are already
using in their regular lives.

Gail
Song Bantum, another member of the pastoral staff at Quest, stresses that
social media use should not only grow naturally out of the life of the church
but that churches shouldn’t try to jump into social media because they think
it’s the thing to do. “My encouragement would be to do it out of a genuine need
or desire for your particular location and your particular community, and not
out of some sort of competitiveness or pressure that ‘this is now the way to do
church,’” Bantum says. “You don’t always have to tweet during the sermon. As a
pastor, you don’t necessarily have to have a blog like everyone else. I guess
it’s the genuineness of it that I’m striving for and wanting to encourage folks
with, rather than doing it because everyone else is doing it. Engage social
media out of a desire for greater communication, a greater sense of community,
and not out of a kind of pressure.”

It’s essential to folks at Quest that such communication
doesn’t get in the way of the body’s real reason for existence. Jin An, who works for the church
part time on IT issues, says he’s always aware of the church’s central purpose
as he’s working with technology. “We never want to rob [congregants] of the
basic fact that they’re here to worship God,” An says, “and that will never
change, regardless of whether we’re feeding information to your iPad or your
smart device, or whether you’re just looking at a church program and your
Bible.”

Why use social media?

The leaders of Quest Church, and Pastor Eugene Cho in
particular, are well-regarded innovators in the use of social media for
religious communities, but they certainly try to keep it in perspective. The
use of digital media “is one of the things that I have been known for,” Cho
says, but “I don’t know if I want to be known for that, when it’s all said and
done. When I meet my Creator, God’s not going to say, ‘Hey, you’ve utilized
social media well. Come into heaven.’ I’m really hoping that there are more
substantive things.”

But even while recognizing the limits of technology and the
dangers thereof, Cho and others at Quest express a clear appreciation for the
benefits of social media for their congregation and beyond. They list a number
of interrelated ways that social media have helped further the work of the
church and other reasons for using social media:

• Getting to know the
congregation

“One of the job duties of pastors is to know our
congregations, to know the flock that we’re ministering to,” Cho says. “Social
media, in part, is a platform by which people are sharing about their lives.
It’s been very helpful on numerous levels. The last thing I want to do is to
hide behind my pulpit, where my exchange or interchange with individuals is
just once a week behind the pulpit. Social media has helped provide a place where I get
a chance to check into people’s lives throughout the week, here and there.”

Cho says that it’s “both good and bad” that he learns “more
about some of the major things that are going on in their lives through
Facebook” than via other avenues. If it wasn’t for Facebook, he says, he simply
wouldn’t have the option of knowing that level of detail about his congregants’
lives.

• Meeting people
where they are

Derek Sciba, a member of the congregation who works at the
Seattle-based Christian development organization World Concern, argues that
social media are important tools for Christian outreach. “As Christians, we
need to reach people where they’re at, and this is where people are going,”
Sciba says. “Most people spend their time at night surfing around on the
Internet, on Facebook. These are the venues where they’re interacting, where
they’re building relationships. I think it’s up to churches to try to meet
people in these areas and be relevant to that.” Cho echoes the importance of
social media, particularly for a church like Quest, “where we have a lot of
younger folks who are probably 95 percent on some form of social media,
particularly Facebook.”

• Attracting new
people

One of the most common ways people find a church nowadays is
through electronic media—Google searches might top the list, but social media
help many people connect up when they’re looking for a new church. Lee, a web
designer, says that Cho’s blog helped draw him to Quest and that “a lot of my
friends that have found Quest have done so through a Google search” or through
Cho’s Twitter feed or Facebook page. “It’s definitely a
different landscape as to how people find churches now and how people get
connected to churches,” Lee says.

Sciba is another for whom the Internet was helpful in
finding Quest. “I’m a good example of somebody who came to the church because
of its online presence,” Sciba says. “When my wife and I were looking for a
church in Seattle, we searched online for certain terms, and Quest Church came
up in those searches. Because of the optimization of its website and resources
available on its website, we were able to get a good feel for where the church
stood on certain issues, such as the church’s drive for social justice, its
compassion for people who have few means, before we ever walked through the
doors.”

Sciba emphasizes that social media is especially important
in attracting younger and “non-traditional” churchgoers. “This newer media
aspect is playing an increasing role in drawing in people who may be outside of
the realm of traditional church shoppers,” he says, “people who may not
necessarily have been looking to attend a church, but were drawn in by the
message.”

• Disseminating
information

New media, of course, can be useful tools for getting
information out to members of the congregation. “Facebook is one of our main
means of communication, so we ask folks to check our website and Facebook,”
Bantum says. “That’s where we create group pages for activities and events.
It’s to the point I can’t imagine how we’d function without that.”

Social media tools are useful for reaching out to people in
the church beyond Sundays as well. “I don’t want to allocate teaching,
mentoring, friendship to just one sermon a week,” Cho says. “Facebook allows me
to distribute information about ministry, worldview, convictions, and values.”
And these new tools can aid the teaching ministry of the church. “You could say
that it helps us more regularly engage in teaching,” says Cho. “We can use
media as a means of teaching, whether it’s showing videos, posting sermons, or sharing
devotions throughout the week, and know that people are engaging it on some
level or another.” Cho adds that it’s not all about the big picture. “I’m not
just distributing larger information,” he says, “but I’m also sharing my story—it
does give people an opportunity to hear about things in my life, for better and
for worse.”

• Telling our story

Narrative—telling stories—is an essential part of being
church. “Theologically, one of the main things that I would see supporting the
usage of new media is the ability to communicate story and narrative,” Cho
says. “That’s probably the most important thing. One of the ways that God
created us uniquely as human beings is the ability to process stories, to
narrate stories, and to live a better story.”

For Cho, this connects to the larger story of our faith. “Certainly
for us as Christians, let alone pastors, we are part of a larger narrative that
I consider to be the greatest story, the greatest narrative,” Cho says. “This
isn’t just a means for us to engage in pop trends but also to utilize this to
communicate the larger narrative of God that has been personified in Christ.
That would be probably the strongest theological reason why I engage in new
media as another form of communication that is revolutionizing the way that we
do such things.”

• Nurturing community

Digital media has proved to be very helpful in building
community at Quest. “The community aspect of the church—getting church members
to become a community and not just a church attendee—is probably the biggest
area of improvement that I’ve seen with social media,” says Sciba.

A concrete example of community building comes through the
church’s 25 small groups, which use Facebook as a means of connecting members to one
another, encouraging one another, and sharing information. “New media helps us
more deeply engage in community,” says Cho. “It’s certainly a way for us to
build intimacy—not just broadly in community but intimately—for sharing prayer
requests and concerns.”

• Mobilizing around
social issues

“What we’re trying to do is to take our ministry beyond our
walls,” says An. Social media provide “a great means by which we’re able to
create energy and momentum for certain mobilization. You could even call it
evangelism,” Cho says. “There’s a certain power of evangelism that is doable”
as a result of social media, he adds.

“We’re able to rally the larger church around a cause, to
create a stir, to inform as well as to call people to action in a way that I
don’t think we were able to do as effectively maybe 10 years ago,” says Bantum.
“It continues to bind the church, more broadly speaking, in particular ways.
Justice and compassion are probably the most tangible ways that [social media have]
been the most effective.”

• Pastoral care

Social media can complement the in-person outreach by
members of the pastoral staff. Using social media, “we’re able to see how
people are doing,” says An. “We’re able to see if people are hurting, because
that’s how some people will convey that. We’re able to see what’s going on in
people’s lives.”

Through social media, Cho explains, “I’m not just sharing my
story, but learning to listen and hear other people’s stories.” And that
listening process is a key element in pastoring a church. Cho tells of an email
dialogue he had recently with a woman in the congregation whose father was ill.
“After this dialogue,” Cho says, “after not seeing this [woman] in church since
February, I saw her in church this past Sunday.” She expressed to Cho how
encouraging it had been to her to receive a Facebook note from one of the
pastors, expressing concern and support as she went through the difficult time with
her father.

For Cho, the exchange “communicated the truth of the fact that
we all want to be seen and heard. New media, social media, allow us to engage;
by engaging, we’re not simply shouting from the rooftop about boring church
news, but also to have a posture of listening as well. It’s just hard as a
pastor of a growing church to feel like you get a chance to hear everybody. I
certainly can’t meet with everybody. New media allows us to do that.”

• Calling out gifts

Some of the greatest resources for any congregation are the
people themselves. Most needs of the church can be met by drawing on other
members of the body—there are many gifts and one spirit. The challenge, at
times, is simply calling out those gifts. “With all the ways that people are
connected, that’s probably the biggest black hole: that the community is not
able to draw on itself for answers for help that it could and should be able
to,” says An. And while technology can’t solve that, it can help facilitate
connections between people.

“From a technological standpoint, social media definitely
helps with that,” An adds. “That’s one of the ideals that I’ve always had as a
technological professional. I’ve always felt that our communities, the people
that we know, are our best source of information, our best connecting points.
That goes back to the whole ‘six degrees of separation’ concept. You don’t have
to be a part of a social network to understand that per se. When I’m able to ask questions on Facebook and get answers
within 30 seconds, that’s it coming together.”

“For the most part, people are willing to help,” he says.
“But sometimes that isn’t present in our church community, and I’ve always
wondered why. We have forums on our website for that. That’s probably the
greatest thing that could come from it and that churches should try to push
toward.”

• Marketing 101

An believes that the church at large has a lot to learn from
the world of marketing, in particular doing a better job of communicating in
interesting, attention-grabbing ways. “The public gets bored!” An says. “And
like it or not, our congregants are part of the public. They are people.
They’re subject to all the bells and whistles that nonbelievers look at.” Thus
the church must be intentional about what sparks interest and motivates people,
just as are those who market secular products.

“Part of the website is not for your congregation,” says An.
“It’s a marketing tool. Let’s be honest about that. When we first planted
Quest, I was 25, having been involved with Eugene on our previous ministry. I
come from the business world. I was so floored by how churches didn’t want to
use the term ‘marketing.’ It was almost like, ‘We don’t market here.’ But you
are! You have to! You’re appealing to the same people that Best Buy is
competing for.”

• Staying relevant

Churches don’t really have a choice in whether or not to
innovate, according to An. “Innovation has happened,” An says, and yet a
segment of the church “isn’t risking anything and wants to stay where it’s
comfortable. That’s detrimental to the church because the people that we serve
are moving forward; they’re looking for these things.”

An recognizes that “it’s hard to stay on the cutting edge
right now because there are so many people doing everything all at once.” But
he argues that if churches want to stay connected to their congregations, they
have to keep up with changing technologies. “It tests churches in their ability
to stay invested in their congregation beyond Sunday,” he says.

Blurring boundaries
and other potential dangers

While people at Quest Church have adopted new media in
creative and helpful ways and recognize its benefits, they also are very clear
about the dangers. “When I shared some of the positive things about the
influence of new and social media in my life as a pastor,” Cho says, “every
single one of those things, if we’re not careful, could also become very
dangerous as well.”

Several of the people I talked with at Quest emphasized
balance in the use of social media. “It’s really important that we’re not
selling ourselves to one extreme or another,” Cho says, “but utilizing these
things for what they are: good tools!” But Cho expresses his awareness and
wariness of how easily electronic media can take over one’s life. “One of the
great dangers of new media—all forms of media—is that it has certainly very
much blurred the lines of what a 9-to-5 job looks like,” Cho says. “Ministry
before media was never a 9-to-5 job, but it has made it even that much more
complicated.”

Cho says that he realizes that “the boundaries I once had
have become blurred because of social media. I’ve been much more intentional
[about dealing with this], not because I feel like I’m in a danger zone but
realizing that it’s not just about my
boundaries. There are also boundaries that I need to respect in a communal
sense as well.”

Bantum says that, with new media, there’s “a greater demand
for access, and a greater expectation of response. For pastors and for leaders of
the church, it’s more pressure to keep up with the different avenues of
communication.” She says that sometimes the sheer volume, over various new
media channels, can be frustrating. “There’s a lot more to manage and
administrate. Congregants feel that they have greater access to us and have an
expectation to have interaction more frequently.”

Congregation members express sympathy for the busy lives
that their pastors lead, but they also articulate their expectations of ready
access very well. “I believe that culturally new media has greatly reduced the
time in which we would expect a response,” says Sciba. “Ten years ago, if you
were to talk to a pastor at church one Sunday, he might check in with you the
next Sunday. Now, in this time frame, it would not be surprising to get some
other touch in new media because it’s just so easy to reach out.” Sciba admits
that such expectations aren’t entirely realistic. “Granted, if you have your
whole congregation expecting that, you won’t have nearly the time to do this.”
In the next breath, though, he points out that new media make it simpler to
answer in a timely manner. “I believe that [new media] should afford a pastor some increased flexibility to communicate
because of the easiness in reaching people. I think that it is definitely up to
pastors to step up and enter this new way of communicating with your
congregations.”

While the use of new media can facilitate a higher degree of
communication and connection among people in a church, the Quest pastors warn
that it should never replace actual human connection. “We should look at new
media as a means of how we can continue to express pastoral care and carry out
our calling,” says Cho, but “the danger is that we hide behind it. I see that
as a growing temptation.” Cho continues, “One of the reasons why I have great
admiration for the apostle Paul, despite some of my theological angst over some
of his interpretation, is that the guy was out and about, meeting and engaging,
befriending and contending. Not to say that you can’t do those things [with
social media], but we should never replace live human interaction with new
media.” Pastor Bantum adds, “I can’t help but think of it sacramentally.
Sacrament can’t happen outside of incarnational presence.”

Leaders at Quest expressed their commitment to ensure that
the use of new technologies in church communication wouldn’t leave out those
who haven’t adopted new media. Being sensitive to full inclusion is especially
important given the particular history of the church. Quest was founded a
decade ago as a church plant and soon connected to the Evangelical Covenant
denomination. In the past five years, the church has merged with an older
Covenant congregation called Interbay Covenant Church, and the members have
been working and worshipping together as one body since. Many of Interbay’s
members were significantly older while Quest before the merger attracted a
large number of people in their 20s and 30s. The church today still has a high
percentage of younger members—a demographic that generally has a higher comfort
level with new technology and with new media in particular. The mix of the old
and the new—and the young and the old—requires a special sensitivity in using
recently introduced forms of communication to ensure that no one is left out or
left behind.

Another danger of social media, according to Cho, is how
quickly a message can be sent out, sometimes without the needed aforethought. And he stresses the importance of discretion.
“We’ve all seen how sometimes, in certain emotions, we can write something that,
before you know it, goes out to all those places,” says Cho. “We see this
impacting people socially, in marriage, politically, even in church as well. We
need to realize that in this instant-gratification culture, while we’re able to
respond to something instantly, we still need to be thoughtful about what we’re
saying and writing.”

Cho continues, “On a micro level, I’ve seen instances of
people sharing something, writing something or posting a picture of something
that may not have been the most appropriate. We’re seeing examples of this
coming back to harm people, whether it’s job interviews or in other ways.
There’s a lot of wisdom for churches and pastors as well to be wise in how we
utilize new media.”

One key aspect that requires discretion, according to An, is
the question of what should be kept confidential, or shared only among the
congregation members, and what is appropriate to share more broadly. “Churches
need to be very mindful about the fact that what they’re conveying is not for
everybody, and it shouldn’t be for everybody,” An says. “I think it’s always a
juggle to know when you should focus inward and when you should focus outward.
On our website, we’re clear as to what areas we focus to just our community and
what areas we use to appeal to the broader public.”

Bantum feels that some of the problems are culturally
rooted. “I wonder, 10 years
from now, how this is going to turn out, especially among the younger
generation,” she says. “I wonder how much of the social media rage feeds upon
the Western desires for individuality and anonymity, yet wanting our voice to
be heard, without being accountable to anybody. What’s happening in this space,
where words and thoughts and ideas are being put out there, and how is that
affecting the daily life of those who profess in Jesus?”

Cho echoes that analysis. “New media plays off something that
is part of our human nature,” he says. “It plays off a sense of narcissism. There’s
a part of me that is narcissistic. You don’t have to tell me that new media
brings it out of me. It’s part of my engagement with my flesh. There’s
something about narcissism and egotism where we want attention, we want people
to look into our lives.”

Bantum worries about the tendency of social media to create
what she calls a “false sense of community,” as well as a “false sense of
presence.” She asks, “What does it mean to be a community of presence? It’s so
easy for us sometimes to just rely on social media and conversations and ideas,
but what does it mean to really be present for one another? This is really
important for us pastors. Social media cannot replace our tangible presence. I
think social media can enhance what’s already here, but it can’t replace who we
are in this place.”

For all her concerns, Bantum recognizes both the benefits
and the dangers around the use of new media. “Social media is such an integral
part of what we know and almost who we’re becoming,” she says. “I’ve had to learn
what it means to do ministry in this context.”For Bantum, some of that entails a tricky balancing act. “There are many
times when Jesus, in his life of ministry, preached and performed miracles to
the masses and the crowds. But there are probably more moments when he stepped
back and chose to be with the one, whether it’s the Samaritan woman or one of
his disciples. So what does that look like to us as church leaders to not get
so caught up in the masses? Sometimes social media can tend to focus on the
self. So how do we become people that are inclusive of the body of Christ and
speak to the body? I think it’s a very tricky balance.”

In the final analysis, Cho feels that technology is, in
effect, neutral—it can be used in both positive and negative ways. Human
ability, he says, gives us the capacity to use it for good, or potentially for
bad as well. “But having said that,” he adds, “I know that we’re still in the
early stages of social media. Christians have certainly adopted it. There are
many that are struggling through it. Calling and challenging and inviting
pastors to think more theologically about the impact and ramifications is
really important. I find myself thinking about these things very much recently,
particularly as I hear about more and more children struggling with the
consequences of addiction to technology, with insurance companies now beginning
to add addiction to technology as one of the things that they’re covering.
Those are big, big issues. I am curious as to how not only the church but the
larger society will evolve with these matters.”

Jim Rice, a research fellow for the New Media Project, is editor ofSojournersmagazine in Washington, D.C.

The New Media Project is a research project helping religious leaders become theologically savvy about technology. To request permission to repost this content, please contact newmediaproject@cts.edu.